A blog about evolution, anthropology, and science, inspired by the three Georges: Gaylord Simpson, Carlin, and S. Kaufman.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

A Rootin', Tootin' Blog Post

The newest issue of the Yearbook
of Physical Anthropology contains some provocative material (including my
own article, “Why Be Against Darwin? Creationism, Racism and the Roots of
Anthropology”), but one other article in particular is provoking this rant –
“Two Faces of Earnest A. Hooton” by Eugene Giles.1

Giles’s ambition here is to clear the air about Hooton, who
was a leading public intellectual at Harvard during his term there (1913-1954),
and trained the first generation of “modern” (i.e., post-WWII) biological
anthropologists. Hooton was also the
leading scientific authority on race in the US, and a long-term advocate of the
science of eugenics (along with nearly all the other natural scientists in the
US), and Giles sets himself the task of defending Hooton from the charges of
being a racist and a eugenicist.

Was Hooton a racist?
Well, obviously that’s a term that doesn’t translate well across the
generations. Giles correctly notes that
Hooton was the mentor of an African American M.A. student, Caroline Bond Day,
and had a good relationship with both Howard University and the NAACP. But first things first. Who says Hooton was a racist (whatever that
term might mean, applied retrospectively to someone who indeed worked with Franz
Boas against Nazi anthropology)? Giles
blames the American Anthropological Association’s “Race: Are We So Different?” website.

Opening of "Race: Are We So Different?"
at the Discovery Place in Charlotte, last year.

Disclaimer: I had nothing whatsoever to do with that website, or the traveling museum exhibit (although I have no idea why Peggy Overbey didn’t invite me into it). I do like it, though. I was quoted in it, and attended its opening in Charlotte, and did a public radio show to promote it.

Giles does catch some inaccuracies, to be sure, but they are
fleas on a big dog. In the first place,
there is no definitive work on Hooton, and those of us with historical
interests have been waiting for many years for Giles himself to provide
it. Perhaps if he had done so, the AAA
exhibit would have been able to get their facts straighter.

Washburn blowing out the candles
on his birthday cake for the last time.

But more significantly, the AAA Race website certainly was
not the ultimate source of the accusation that Hooton was a racist. His former student (and AAA President in
1962-3), Sherwood Washburn, had been saying that for half a century. By the time I met Washburn, just a few years
before his death, if I mentioned Hooton, Sherry would say, “He was a racist,
you know”.

There are two things that come through clearly about Hooton. First, he did not take himself all that
seriously. And second, his views
evolved. Consequently, although it may
be tempting to try and find a “real” Hooton behind all the verbiage and
sometimes the outward silliness, that is probably an essentialist fallacy. My reading of his
work is that although his ideas about the meaning of race evolved – I allow
students to compare his 1926 and 1936 papers on race in Science, in the latter of which he is desperately trying to
differentiate his good American racial anthropology from bad German racial
anthropology2,3 – he consistently maintained an anachronistic view that there was
a direct and deterministic relationship between how you looked and how you
thought. This is what united Hooton’s
interests in race, criminal anthropology, eugenics, and constitutional
anthropology; and what his later students rejected after World War II.

I think that, like a lot of Americans, Hooton took a swing
to the right after World War II. In the
case of the “constitutional anthropology” of William H. Sheldon, which asserted
a direct connection between body build and personality, Hooton should have been
smart enough to see through it, like his later students, but couldn’t; and he
was actually hurt when it got back to him that he was being called a
fascist. Washburn, with whom he was
still on good terms, wrote him quite
poignantly, “To
put the matter bluntly, none of your pupils think that you are at all a
fascist. But, anyone reading Sheldon’s
last book, taking the last 100 pages for what they say, and then hearing that
you believe in Sheldon’s system, might call you a fascist with some
justification. What we need is the
separation of the sane study of body-build from Sheldon’s
system.”4

But Hooton was also genteel and non-confrontational,
preferring to criticize someone behind their back rather than to their face. Madison Grant’s 1916 ThePassing of the Great Race
was a bestselling classic of scientific racism, called “my bible” by Hitler,
and invoked at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence that the Germans accused of war
crimes had been inspired by American ideas; but Hooton, like many scientists,
served under Grant in the American Eugenics Society. In 1918, Hooton writes a little throwaway
line in the context of a review of a different book in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, “Only the Prussians and
Madison Grant now believe that the Nordics are a race of supermen and
archangels.”5 Cute, huh? But he never uses his stature
as a Harvard expert on race to challenge Madison Grant. And when Grant sends him a copy of his 1933
book, The Conquest of A Continent (i.e.,
more of same), Hooton writes him back politely after reading only the first
chapter, “I
don’t expect that I shall agree with you at every point, but you are probably
aware that I have a basic sympathy for you in your opposition to the flooding
of this country with alien scum.”6

Of course, he is referring to my grandparents there. So fuck him.

After Grant’s death, Hooton had some race-nerd fun at his
expense:

Madison
Grant had a vivid personality and a long head, but, as I remember him, rather a
swarthy complexion. I was curious about
his conception of Nordicism; so I tackled him on the subject of my own racial
type. I said, “Mr. Grant, I have a round
head with a cephalic index of 85, brown hair, mixed eyes, a moon face and a
blobby nose – all these attractive features going with a muddy complexion. How would you classify me as to race? I should call myself a mixed Alpine.” He asked, “Are you not of purely British
ancestry?” I replied, “Yes, my father is
an Englishman and my mother is a Scotch Canadian.” He said, “Then, damn it, you’re a
Nordic.” That is the only occasion when
I have been so classified.7

(I
published that last bit in my Current
Anthropology paper earlier this year.)8

Anyway, when it came to eugenics, Hooton’s views were not very
nuanced, but he believed that all races had comparable proportions of the
unfit, and they should all be extirpated.
It took him till 1936 to resign from the Advisory Board of the American
Eugenics Society, and even then, he kept up his membership. The American Eugenics Society lost most of
its members by 1933, with the Great Depression and the accession of the Nazis. Even its Secretary-Treasurer, Leon Whitney,
had to quit in 1932 because they couldn’t afford to pay him (Whitney went on to become
an authority on animal breeding) – but it limped along, with stalwarts like
Hooton.

21 Feb 1937

21 March 1937

So, yes, Hooton was a eugenicist, and to his discredit, he
continued to be one long after it fell out of fashion in the scientific
community. In 1937, Hooton gave a talk
at the Harvard Club in Kansas City, which made the front page of The New York Times. He called for a biological purge upon the
unfit. Oh, sure, he was just being a wry wag, wishing he were James Thurber, but
this was 1937 already, and the Nuremberg Laws were already on the books. You think Hooton read the newspapers? A month later, the Times got a hold of that elderly cultural anthropologist from
Columbia, Franz Boas – with whom Hooton had a respectful relationship – to slap
him down.

(And yet, the Times also covered Hooton’s 1944 NAACP
address, with the headline, “Dr. Hooton Assails Racial Prejudice.” As I say, he was complicated.)

I think it was my old professor, Hermann Bleibtreu, who
first showed me Hooton’s illustration of the Jewish
face.9 No, that definitely hasn’t aged
well. In fact it is so bizarre that it's hard to believe he intended for it to be taken completely seriously. As Hooton wrote a few pages later, "Without going into excessive detail, these are then my impressions of the cause of the physical distinctiveness of many Jewish individuals. I may be wrong. This subject has not been completely or scientifically explored, and I am recording impressions rather than the results of detailed surveys." (Washburn was also quick to
identify Hooton as an anti-Semite, but Hooton’s first student was Harry
Shapiro, later a long-time curator at the AMNH.
I once heard a story that Hooton brought Shapiro to the notoriously
anti-Semitic Galton Society in New York, to educate them as to what a “good Jew” was.)

Hooton’s doggerel in “Subverse”
is far more horridly sexist than racist.
But he clearly aspired to be the Dorothy Parker of old-school physical
anthropology:

The
Bushman’s stature is not great,

His
jaw is quite prognathous;

Within
his yellow, wool-starred pate

His
skull is not capacious.

His
seamed membranous lips are thick;

His
molars are protrusive;

He
sprays his words with dental click,

His
speech is most effusive.

He
squints with epicanthous eye

Across
a nose prodigious;

He
likes his ostrich-eggs quite high,

His
women steatopygeous.

That’s better than I could do, and it’s a guilty pleasure of
mine, even if there are some errors of physical anthropology in there. But as long as we’re on the subject, Hooton
was definitely not in Ogden Nash’s league – here is Ogden Nash on anthropology:

Why
does the Pygmy

Indulge
in polygmy?

His
tribal dogma

Frowns
on monogma.

Monogma's
a stigma

For
any Pygma.

If
he sticks to monogmy

A
Pygmy's a hogmy.

Anyway, back to Hooton.
His ideas about race, and about human biology generally, certainly weren’t
the worst ones around at the time, but that’s faint praise. I think my biggest problem with Hooton, since
it’s hard to know exactly what he did believe at any point in time, is that he did not use his
position as an authority to confront and repudiate the worst elements of racial
science in America. He went after the Germans, which was safe, and although he
tried to differentiate his racial science from theirs, he ultimately was not
very successful, because his physical anthropology was in fact only subtly
different from theirs.

Sherry Washburn once told me a story about the time he first
met Theodosius Dobzhansky, both of whom were on the faculty at Columbia. Washburn visited Doby, who eyed him warily, and asked, “So you
were a student of Hooton’s? So what
exactly does he mean by “racial type”? I
just don’t understand it .” And Sherry replied,
“I have no idea, and I think neither does he.”
At which point Doby shook his hand, and they became fast friends.

(Probably bullshit, of course, but Sherry did tell it to me.)

I think Giles’s main mistake was in trying to defend Hooton
rather than trying to complexify him.
And there is a certain irony in Giles going after the AAA’s race
website, rather than real source of the harsh judgment of Hooton, which was
from Sherry Washburn. Washburn got on quite
badly with Hooton’s first two students, Harry Shapiro and Carleton Coon, both
of whom were fiercely loyal to Hooton.
Shapiro was cold to Washburn when he taught at Columbia Medical School,
and was studying the growth of rat skulls.
Coon was giving clandestine assistance to the segregationists, and was a
target of Washburn’s 1962 AAA Presidential address,10 which consigned racial
anthropology to the dustbin of history, as Washburn had been arguing for a
decade. (In fact, Washburn also recalled Dobzhansky, at the time a member of the American Anthropological Association, rushing up to be the first to shake his hand after the address.)

That was the point of Washburn’s famous, paradigmatic paper
on “The New Physical Anthropology” (1951).11
I’m sure you can guess who embodied the old.

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